A key to the head scratcher Beautiful scenery, excellent acting, thought-provoking story. However, this film is so wrapped up in itself, it fails to remember it has an audience to satisfy. In performance art films, audience is an integral part of what takes place, and the filmmaker has an obligation to provide the means for authentic interaction. The problem with "Hold the Dark" is that it is so obtuse, it frustrates viewers, rather than making a connection. Imho, if the viewer understands the film's central metaphor of humans as wild animals, particularly wolves, most of the confusion evaporates. Certainly the clues are there, but they are buried.
Consider the following and then see if your understanding of the film is re-framed:
The entire film is set in Alaska, a giant metaphor for wilderness and wildness beyond the usual veneer of human civilization. When the writer/wolf expert invited to a tiny Northern Alaska village tells the woman who has invited him there that his daughter is in Anchorage, she tells him "that's not the real Alaska down there", implying it's too civilized. The woman is Medora Sloan, whose son has been taken, she says, by wolves. Oddly in her letter invitation, she has told the wolf expert she wants him to find the wolf that took her child, but not to kill it.
Later, when asked how she met her husband Vernon Sloan, she says she never met him,but that he was just in every memory she has ever had, implying they are from the same clan, family, even perhaps brother and sister and have followed wolf mating practices which can include incest.
Even later, Medora assumes a wolf identity by donning a wolf mask when she tries to seduce the writer. And she tries to get him to strangle her as a part of foreplay, reminiscent of the biting and violence that accompanies actual wolf mating rituals.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Vernon dispatches insurgents and friendlies with equal "cold-bloodedness", prompting an observer to call him a "real meat-eater". (Interesting: Medora, the wife's name, is also the name of a town known as North Dakota's top tourist attraction which was originally founded as a meat-packing plant). And in a flashback, Vernon and son Bailey sit near the meat of a carcass of a freshly killed deer as he asks, "How did that feel?" Did that feel good?" Bailey agrees that it did.
Eventually, the writer discovers Bailey's body of hidden in the house, dead from strangulation not wolves, and Medora is missing. Not long after that, he has the opportunity to see a wolf pack eating a dead pup, and we learn that's a common occurence when food is short or there is "something wrong" with the pups. BIG hint.
When Vernon comes home from Iraq because the son has died, he is equally ruthless in dispatching anyone he sees as weak or unable to adequately perform their duties-the way a wolf pack will dispatch a sick member.
There is also an exchange in which Vernon visits an Indian hunter who tells him they met when Vernon was a boy and that HIS father had wanted "wolf's oil" from the hunter in order to help Vernon who had something about him that was "unnatural" and "not right", implying something also was wrong with Vernon's son Bailey as well.
This visit comes just after Sloan has been at a tiny hotel where his wife had stayed two nights before. The proprietor tells him the sheets have not been changed. Vernon enters the room, kneels by the bed, buries his head in the sheets, inhaling Medora's scent deeply with surprising longing rather than sadness or anger.
Vernon also has a bond with a First Nations man who has lost a daughter to wolves...a possible hint that the incest practices of wolf-packs are at work in more families in the village than just that of the Sloans. And, true to pack behavior, the friend chooses pack over non-pack when he goes to extremes to protect and support Vernon as he begins his hunt for Medora.
In contrast, Vernon kills an old woman who has broken the law of pack-first and she actually whines submissively as he stands over her, ready to strike the fatal blow.
Things fall into place even more when Vernon, wearing a wolf mask on finding Medora, begins to strangle her-which then turns into making love.
As for why the two dig up their son's remains and take the body with them? Recall the wolves eating the pups? Yep.
Equipped with some of those insights, one should be able to not just more fully understand the balance of the film but also, hopefully, enjoy it.